Psychoses are serious mental illnesses characterized by defective or lost contact with reality. Psychotic patients may also suffer hallucinations and delusions as part of their disease. Psychoses exact a tremendous emotional and economic toll on the patients, their families, and society as a whole. While the mechanisms underlying these diverse disease states are poorly understood, recently discovered therapies are offering new hope for the treatment of psychotic patients. Progress in the treatment of psychotic conditions has been achieved through the introduction of new, atypical antipsychotic agents. While the side effect profile of these atypical antipsychotics is far superior to that of traditional agents, weight gain is a side effect that has been observed in patients treated with the atypical antipsychotics.
These new agents, while holding the promise of improving the lives of psychotic patients immeasurably, may not be sufficient to treat every psychotic patient. Since psychotic conditions appear to have a complex etiology, some schizophrenics which exhibit depressive episodes during the course of their illness, or depressed individuals which also have psychotic episodes, may not find total relief using only an atypical antipsychotic agent.